Imaging may refer to capturing and representing the color and brightness characteristics of digital images (e.g., photographs and motion video). Low dynamic range (LDR) imaging may represent digital images with 8 or fewer bits for each color channel of a pixel. As a result, up to 256 levels of brightness may be supported. Currently, a wide range of video output devices (e.g., computer monitors, tablet and smartphone screens, televisions, etc.) support displaying LDR images.
However, real-world scenes often exhibit a wider range of brightness than can be represented by LDR imaging. As an example scene with a wide brightness range, consider an individual standing in a dark room in front of a window. This scene may include both extremely bright regions (e.g., sunlit features outside the window) and extremely dark regions (e.g., the features in the room). This scene may be considered to be a high dynamic range (HDR) scene, and some details of the scene might not be able to be properly exposed in a single captured image.